BOB WOODWARD, the journalist whose reports helped to bring down President Nixon, made an extraordinary apology to his own newspaper yesterday for withholding key details about the CIA leak that is rocking the White House.

Mr Woodward, who exposed the Watergate scandal with his fellow Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein, kept quiet for more than two years after he learnt the identity of Valerie Plame, the CIA agent at the centre of the scandal, in mid-June 2003.

His involvement in the affair, which has already led to perjury charges against the Vice-President’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, emerged only yesterday in a Post article and pitched Washington into a renewed frenzy about Mr Woodward’s unnamed source.

The Post disclosed that Mr Woodward testified under oath to Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald on Monday that an official in the Bush Administration told him about Mrs Plame a month before her name appeared in the media.

Mr Woodward said that the official, whom he refused to name in public but identified to Mr Fitzgerald, was not Mr Libby. Nor was it Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, named today in The Washington Post as another senior source Mr Woodward met in June 2003 to interview for a book on Iraq.

But the revelation that the unnamed official disclosed Mrs Plame’s name seems to contradict Mr Fitzgerald’s allegation that Mr Libby first leaked Mrs Plame’s identity after her husband’s outspoken attacks on the White House handling of Iraq weapons intelligence.

Mr Libby’s attorney, Ted Wells, last night called Mr Woodward’s disclosure a “bombshell that undermined Fitzgerald’s criminal case”.

“We are very grateful for Mr Woodward for coming forward,” Mr Wells said.

The disclosure of Mr Woodward’s involvement in the case caused astonishment at The Washington Post which admitted that its star reporter had been wrong to keep his insights on to himself.

Mr Woodward, who kept the identity of Deep Throat, his Watergate source, secret for 30 years, said that he held back the information because he wanted to protect his sources.

He told the newspaper’s website: “I hunkered down. I’m in the habit of keeping secrets. I didn’t want anything out there that was going to get me subpoenaed.”

But Leonard Downie Jr, the Executive Editor, said that Mr Woodward “made a mistake”. He added: “He still should have come forward, which he now admits.”

Mr Woodward added: “I apologised because I should have told Mr Downie about this much sooner. I explained in detail that I was trying to protect my sources. That’s Job No. 1 in a case like this.”

Howard Kurtz, a senior journalist on the The Washington Post, told CNN: “Bob Woodward does not consider his involvement to be a big story . . . but this [the CIA leak case] has mushroomed into a huge national scandal. We have had front page after front page and it was quite a stunning revelation to all of us who work here to find out that Bob Woodward had any involvement in this at all.”

Mr Downie denied that Mr Woodward would suffer the same fate as Judith Miller, the reporter who kept quiet about how she learnt of Mrs Plame’s identity in a conversation with Mr Libby late in June 2003 and who left the The New York Times this month.

But the case has Washington buzzing once again about who leaked Mrs Plame’s name after her husband, the former ambassador Joe Wilson, criticised the Iraq war.

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